Black Hat creates a one-use time machine. Cueball selects the most common suggestion for a time machine usage: killing Adolf Hitler. Black Hat finally relents and goes to kill Hitler. He returns, commenting that he found Hitler in a very noisy bunker in the year 1945. Cueball realizes to his dismay that Black Hat wasted his one and only opportunity by killing Hitler after his regime was already collapsing and Soviet troops were closing in on him, thus leaving the course of history unaltered from the normal timeline in which Hitler committed suicide to avoid capture.

Discussion

Actually, I think the joke here is that Black Hat actually did end Hitler's atrocities, but that history is not actually changeable. Hitler's "suicide" was actually Black Hat killing him. This is then layers with the impossibility of changing history. This would imply that anyone that wants to stop Hitler before he rose to power will be circumvented.

According to all reasonable time travel theories, this makes sense. You cannot go into the past to change things, because the future that exists is a future where you were in the past - you just didn't know it yet because it was in your future. This also applies to the future. Your knowledge of the future cannot possibly change it because your foreknowledge exists in this future. If your foreknowledge made that future not happen, then there would be no need to change it. But the future and the past account for the fact that you were there to change things, even before you ever knew you would be. Ergo, any attempt to change the past will merely result in causing the past to result exactly as it did before. The catch-22 of time travel stories. You can have a fatal flaw, or a fatally uncompelling story. But, all that said, this is a cartoon and not necessarily reliant on reasonable time travel theory.76.29.225.28 07:07, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

That's exactly my opinion on this topic! Look at this video (Mercedes vs Hitler in the past): [[1]] ~~Muessigb

True, killing Hitler before he rose to power and committed all his atrocities would cause a Grandfather paradox... Cueball invented the time machine and send Black Hat back because he wanted Hitler dead, but if Hitler died before that, there would be no reason to invent the time machine and send Black Hat back which ergo cause the initial trip to kill Hitler not possible and ergo Hitler couldn't die before he rises to power and committed his atrocities. 175.137.100.81 01:40, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Maybe in the original timeline, Hitler's atrocities extended beyond 1945. When Black Hat went back in time and assassinated Hitler in 1945, a new time-line was created. When Black Hat returned to the current date, he returned to a different timeline than the one he left. In this timeline (ours), Hitler died in 1945, and because this timeline is based on that fact, Cueball thinks that Black Hat has not changed anything, when in fact, Black Hat's actions created the new timeline. -- mwburden 70.91.188.49 15:00, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The only flaw in that logic is that there's really no way Hitler would have survived the Russian invasion. He was in a bunker, killing himself, because his whole nation and army were crushed. He would have been put on trial and no doubt executed, if not shot by the first soldier who saw him. -HavokTheorem 121.73.107.90 04:30, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for this answer. My faith in explainxkcd contributors was declining rapidly until I reached your comment. 108.162.219.58 20:20, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Was the explanation always as bad as it appears now?? It's awful. 108.162.219.58 01:34, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

First off, in a previous time line he could have escaped to a Moon Base to rebuild his army and destroy the world and Cueball just does not remember that history, just the one where Hitler dies in the bunker. Second, there are many forms of logical time travel. You could jump to a different Now 70 years ago and kill Hitler (assuming he exists) and then come back. Your timeline would not have changed, but the other Now would have a future without Hitler. The good or bad that is achieved is the same, but you get no benefit other then the joy of killing Hitler. And you really should seek professional help for that.--108.162.219.18 18:52, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Did Randall at least partly choose Hitler because of the old rumour that he wasn't actually dead (Because hearing the news of his death may have seemed incredulous, and and because his body was removed by the Soviets, who never openly revealed information to the West). Sorry about the wordiness of this comment, I hope you'll be able to comprehend it. 108.162.250.223 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

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